Why is the White House silent on Sudan? 150,000 people dead, famine looms but Biden's spokesman can't cope with questions and the president hasn't issued a statement in a year

More than 150,000 people dead, another nine million forced from their homes by a year of fighting, and millions more living in the shadow of famine.

The African nation of Sudan is once again on the brink of genocide as rival generals battle for power. 

Yet when John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, was asked what the Biden administration was doing to help ease a deepening humanitarian crisis he had nothing to offer.

'I'm going to take your question on Darfur... and get back to you, rather than try to explain something that may just make me sound stupid,' he told a reporter during a telephone briefing on Thursday. 

'So I don’t want to do that. I want to do that right and take the question for you.'

It was an unusual moment for Kirby, who has impressed journalists with his ability to flit from world crisis to world crisis dispensing talking points at will.

But for Sudan watchers, desperate for the Biden administration to act, it was telling.

'It is the public expression of a private policy, that they're not prioritizing this crisis,' said Nicole Widdersheim, deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch and former director for African affairs at the White House National Security Council.

She added that she was astonished his briefing notes did not include a boilerplate expression of concern and call for peace.

She said: 'You don't have a go-to talking point on the biggest humanitarian crisis facing Africa, Northern Africa and frankly threatening Europe, in decades?'

White House officials push back on any idea that they do not have the bandwidth to deal with Sudan at the same time fighting rages in Gaza and Ukraine. And they point to the three statements made by President Joe Biden since fighting broke out.

Yet the most recent of those was more than a year ago.

And in that time he has tweeted about Sudan precisely four times—the exact same number as he has posted about the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee demanded that the White House step up to prevent a repeat of the genocide that engulfed the western region of Darfur two decades ago.

'The evidence strongly suggests that genocide is occurring in Darfur. The fact that the president’s spokesperson cannot articulate that is indicative they are not paying nearly enough attention to Africa,' said Rep. Michael McCaul. 

'As the conflict escalates throughout Sudan, I once again call on the administration to present a clear strategy on how it will achieve a lasting ceasefire and set the country back on the path to civilian-led rule.'

Sudan has been gripped by war since April 2023, when tensions between rival military leaders erupted into violence. 

It pits Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudan Armed Forces, against the the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by Gen, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known universally as 'Hemedti.'

The result is an already fragile nation pushed to breaking point. Aid workers will tell you it has the potential to rank alongside the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s in terms of misery.

Last month Biden's own envoy told the Senate as many as 150,000 people had already died. 

The UN's World Food Programme says 18 million people face acute hunger across the country, but aid agencies cannot reach those in need because of fighting.

Both sides are accused of using hunger as a weapon of war. 

And the State Department has determined that both sides have committed war crimes. In particular, members of the RSF and its allied militias stand accused of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

The fighting carries echoes of the genocide that gripped the country's western Darfur region 20 years ago.

The RSF, derived from the Janjaweed fighters that burned and looted villages then, is now encircling El Fasher, where the UN says 800,000 civilians are trapped.

Add to the mix the fact that Egypt and Qatar are backing the SAF with Saudi backing, the United Arab Emirates is accused of funneling weapons to the RSF, and Moscow has a foot in each camp and the result is recipe for regional conflagration. 

Against that backdrop, human rights groups and aid agencies have become increasingly outspoken at what they see as White House inaction.

An alliance of campaigners delivered a 15,000-signature petition in April, the anniversary of the outbreak of war, demanding that Biden speak up.

'Despite this, President Biden has been nearly silent on Sudan for over a year,' said Amnesty International. 

His last statement, apart from asides in an Eid greeting or broader messages about aid bills, was on June 20, 2023. 

Widdersheim said Washington must pressure outside powers to end their support for warring parties, help implement a weapons embargo, and begin the process of designing a mission t protect civilians.

'The US has enormous amount of pressure that they are not leveraging on the Gulf actors who are basically the funders and supporters and the guardians of these general,' she said.

That was the case, she added, before the Oct 7 Hamas attack shifted the focus to Middle East.

'I can't help but feel that this is still the same old classic case of African mega crises just not rising to the level of prioritisation for Western governments,' she said.

At previous briefings Kirby has rebutted any suggestion that the administration is prioritizing other areas and neglecting Sudan. 

'I would push back on the notion that we’re somehow so fixated on what’s going on in the Middle East that we can’t focus on other places around the world, including Africa,' he said in January.

'We continue to be engaged diplomatically to make sure to — to do what we can to see that the aspirations of the Sudanese people are met and that the — and that the violence between these two sides stops.'

Cameron Hudson, senior fellow at the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there was no excuse for not being able to comment on Sudan, just a day after The New York Times had published huge multimedia appeal for action on an unfolding catastrophe.

But he said this administration did not feel the weight of history that, for example, George W. Bush felt in 2003 when the last Sudanese genocide was under way.

'Jake Sullivan [national security adviser] and Joe Biden are not worried about the historical record or their legacy in responding to genocide,' he said.

'And I think the reason for that is the lesson that they're drawing on is the lesson of American overreach in not just places like Iraq and Afghanistan but very specifically in Libya.'

An intervention to halt a genocide in 2011 ended up as a regime-change operation, he added, that triggered the collapse of a country and a crisis across Central Africa.

Like generals fighting the last war, he said, 'We're always trying to correct that record with the current case.'